Topics segregated by religion?

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Is it now policy on this board that members will be banned from participating is certain topics because of their religious beliefs?

GAE and the Noahic Flood (for CASEs) - Peaceful Science

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ps-posters

What religious belief do the participants have in common?

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That is not the case, but the OP is often guide for what is considered off-topic.

The forum has been busy lately, with more (and more difficult) moderation decisions. My educated guess is this may have prompted your question.

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Specifically, I recently discovered ā€œmuch dramaā€ waiting for me in the queue. I didnā€™t have time to sort it out, nor to referee an ongoing squabble, so I closed the thread and rejected all waiting comments. That is not an ideal decision, bur it had reached a point at which I needed to defend my own time.

Having Andrew on board as moderator should help to keep things running smoothly. I have advised him that sometimes the best way to make hard moderation decisions is to choose the option that requires they least time to resolve. The time burden should be on the members to post comments that donā€™t impose a lot of effort on the mods. :cowboy_hat_face:

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FWIW, I think the occasional curated discussion would be fun and interesting and ā€“ I strongly suspect ā€“ easier to moderate. I can picture a curated or ā€œinvitation onlyā€ discussion that only involves Christians or parents or educators or chatbots that have accidentally achieved consciousness. I do still hope to see the forum be a place to explore what it means to be human, even if there is a founding focus on evolution, genetics, and Christianity.

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A few points.

  1. I donā€™t think anybody is being banned ā€œbecause of their religious beliefsā€ from the linked-to thread. Both @John_Harshman and myself have been quite active on that thread.

  2. In the past there have been threads that have specifically sought out the opinions of members of a particular religious group on a topic, e.g. to YECs or to Christians, and have led to either a request for non-members to abstain from posting, and/or posts from non-members being moved elsewhere.

  3. Although I donā€™t see such threads as problematical in and of themselves, I think it is very important that such threads be clearly marked, in both their title and their OP, as to who participation is being limited to. I can remember at least one thread where there was little (no?) indication of the restriction before a ā€˜transgressingā€™ post was made.

  4. If such a thread is created, it should be in the knowledge that a companion ā€˜Comments on ā€¦ā€™ thread coming into existence is highly likely, and that there is a reasonably good chance that this thread will overshadow the original one.

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OK, thanks for clarifying, everyone.

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